Rondo Award Nomination

Some of you may remember the cover story I wrote in the summer of 2008 about Malatesta's Carnival of Blood, the long-lost, delirious horror film shot at the former Willow Grove Amusement Park. Well, I recently retooled and expanded that article for Video Watchdog magazine, and that piece has now been nominated for "Best Article of 2009" in the 8th annual Rondo Hatton Classic Horror Awards. As a long-time VW reader and subscriber, it was a thrill for me just to be included in the magazine's pages, so being nominated among VW contributors like Stephen Bissette and Kim Newman is quite an honor.

You can read my article and those of my three fellow VW nominees here.

Ballot for the Rondo Award is here, and I'd greatly appreciate your taking the time to vote for me. Ballot-stuffing is frowned upon, so try and vote in as many of the categories as possible - plenty of worthy nominees across the board. Voting closes at midnight on Saturday, April 3.

2009 in Review

Better late than never, right? Here, for those into lists:

Top 10 Jazz CDs

1. Darcy James Argue’s Secret Society, Infernal Machines (New Amsterdam)

2. Vijay Iyer, Historicity (ACT)

3. Steve Lehman Octet, Travail, Transformation and Flow (Pi)

4. Abdullah Ibrahim, Senzo (Sunnyside)

5. David Binney, Third Occasion (Mythology)

6. Henry Threadgill Zooid, This Brings Us To, Vol. 1 (Pi)

7. Tarbaby, s/t

8. Fly, Sky and Country (ECM)

9. The Monterey Quartet, Live at the 2007 Monterey Jazz Festival (Monterey Jazz Festival)

10. Darius Jones Trio, Man'ish Boy (AUM Fidelity)

For details, my Citypaper piece is here.

Top Ten Films

1. 35 Shots of Rum

2. The Hurt Locker

3. Revanche

4. Still Walking

5. Fantastic Mr. Fox

6. Summer Hours

7. Hunger

8. Lorna’s Silence

9. Tokyo Sonata

10. Up

The Citypaper piece is here.

I'm hesitant to make a decade-spanning list (and won't, in the case of music), but with the caveat of a deeply-flawed memory, here's a list of top films for the Aughts:

1. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
2. Mulholland Dr.
3. In the Mood For Love
4. What Time Is It There?
5. Syndromes and a Century
6. Cache
7. The Death of Mr. Lazarescu
8. Pan's Labyrinth
9. Grizzly Man
10. Shaun of the Dead

Return of Your Errant Blogger

Ok, so even by my typically lackluster standards it's been a long dry spell since my last post. No good excuse other than holidays, wedding planning, and a trip to Panama (more on that later) over the last two-and-a-half months. But here is some of the work I've done over the last couple of months; belated year-end lists and such will follow in the next post.

I won't link to every pick and blurb I scrawled for the Citypaper, but I reviewed Wes Anderson's lavishly detailed Fantastic Mr. Fox, Clint Eastwood's South African sports biopic Invictus, Richard Linklater's Efron-meets-Orson flick Me and Orson Welles, Jim Cameron's 3-D behemoth Avatar, Pedro Almodovar's film-and-Penelope-Cruz-obsessed Broken Embraces, Terry Gilliam's return to chaotic form The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, and Jeff Bridges as a weathered country crroner in Crazy Heart; and covered I-House's fascinating Archive Fever program, the Festival of New Trumpet Music's first excursion outside of NYC, the expansive Medical Film Symposium, and Slought Foundation's stunning exhibition of morbidity, Strictly Death.

In the Metro, I interviewed Herb Alpert and The Simpsons biographer John Ortved in November; covered the revamped West Philly spot Marbar, the end of an era that is the final show from Rich Wexler's Sherman Arts, and the unnatural history photos of Richard Barnes' Animal Logic in January (December issues are posted in a format that makes linking impossible, and you're not missing much anyway).

And in the Daily News, I wrote about two local exhibits examining Alice in Wonderland; Orrin Evans' newly-founded Captain Black Big Band, in residency at Chris' Jazz Cafe; and the 22nd annual Conference of the International Association of Blacks in Dance.